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"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?" — Chuck Palahniuk

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

"Think About It Thursday - Fun With FISA!"

I don't know about the rest of you guy's but I was heart broken yet again by what transpired in DC last weekend...Didn't make for a pleasant Monday either once I realized my other page was officially deleted...I have been cheerleading for the Dems and really had faith in them to do what they say they were going to do, and that was to stop this out of control president and so far they have done nothing of consequence...They caved on the troop withdrawal and funding bill and now the ultimate betrayal by letting the same mad man get away with this illegal wiretapping program that is supposed to be making our country safer...

The ultimate slap in the face is the fact that Abu Al Gonzales, Liar Extraordinaire and The "Fredo" of the BCS (Bush Crime Syndicate) is in charge of overseeing the program...Now I know a lot of you don't follow this shit or haven't been but we are talking about the same Gonzales that has continued to lie and obfuscate the truth about what is really going with this program to congress...The same Gonzales that put the heat on John Ashcroft as he was in the hospital just coming out of surgery to sign off on it...That was the fact of all of this that really hurt the most...We know this man is a liar and a loyal bush ass licker, we know he cannot be trusted to work in the besty interest of the people and yet and still we have him in charge of spying on Americans...

Here is the main issue as I see it...There was no problems with the FISA Court other than it and of itself is against the Constitution (the whole transparent Government thing), but that is beside the point because it is here and it was doing it's job...However, there were no changes needed to that bill, just needed to be enforced properly...Like the new "Immigration Bill", it is not needed either just a little bit of enforcement of the laws already on the books would take care of that issue...Not to mention it's all smoke and mirrors to confuse the less thoughtful of the population to get your minds off of what is really going on and arguing on a non-issue while our civil liberties are eroded under the banner of safety from the very monsters they created...

Let's first get some history of FISA...It was originally enacted in 1978 after abuses were discovered in the process of gathering intelligence after the Watergate Affair...There was a court set-up and it was to oversee all the requests for this kind of surveillance...The court is staffed by 11 judges appointed by the Chief Justice for 7 year terms...The big key for FISA was the fact that the Justice Dept has a certain amount of time that it can spy without bringing the warrants to the FISA court, to test it's legality...Since '78 I can't seem to find one case that the the FISA Court has turned down...This program was working just fine...Then along comes the NY Times article in 2005 about pResident Assholio spying on American citizens without warrants...Now it was disclosed that the TSP was started shortly after 911 and some reports say it was started way back in 2000 and I believe that because all of a sudden in 2000 the media turned into a propaganda arm of the rethug party...Who should I believe? The lying treasonous lepers that have hi-jacked our country or the ones trying to expose this travesty?! I gotta go with the latter...

They also hinted that this program the TSP was just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to data mining and all the other cruddy shit this administration is trying to do in respects to spying on US citizens...They have been reading our emails and watching where we go on the net not too mention they can also intercept your physical mail and rummage through it as well...Now I know a lot of you sheeple are thinking, Well they are only spying on Foreign calls, or the one I love the most..."I am not doing anything wrong so what if they listen!" Well, my Sheeple, you wouldn't want me listening in on your freaky phone sex or that hurtful break-up conversation, or your plans to go on vacation you're discussing with the travel agent...Why would you want anyone else doing it?! That to me is like asking someone, "Are you still beating your spouse?" How do you answer that question? Since your not the "decider" of what is considering wrong or subversive, how do you know that they won't misconstrue what your saying? A lot of people think like this...Until I give them that scenario above...I was talking to a friend real recently that was happy she got her new passport and when I told her about the tracking chip inside it she promptly responded that she was not up to anything for them to be following her around for...I responded that, "they don't have too, They are!" I also posed the same question to her, which I haven't received and answer for, and that was, "would you want me tracking you all over the world?" It is the same principle...No privacy or even the illusion of privacy...Once you get that new passport or anything with GPS or RFID chip in it you are plugged into the Matrix...Please believe, regardless of what you claim your not doing they are tracking your every move, your every word, your purchases, your bank accounts and your Internet searches?! Now I ask what could the government possibly want with all of this information on little ole me?! A US citizen that basically follows the law (shhhh) and is just expressing his opinion, which we were once allowed to do here in the US of A...

So now we are at present day and the changes made to this bill is just to cover the "decider's" ass! What the BCS is trying to do is make all the spying they have done with out warrants since 2000 retroactively legal, which can't be done because the crime has already been committed and you cannot make an illegal act legal after the fact...Just like with the Military Tribunals act...The BCS had been torturing those folks at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib so badly and against the Geneva Convention that he had to do something to "Cover His Ass", just in case the Sheeple wake up!

There are quite a few good articles in the blogsphere about this issue but the Muckraker hit the nail on the head...From The Muck:

By Spencer Ackerman - August 7, 2007, 10:30 AMTaking advantage of the difficulty many experts have in understanding Sunday's revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Bush administration is pleading exasperation with misunderstandings of the law. Why can't people understand, asked two senior administration officials in a conference call with reporters yesterday, that the changes to FISA impact only a handful of people? Foreigners, at that! "We're really talking about targeting people, directed targeting at people overseas," assured one of them.

Ah, if only it were so.

The most conspicuous aspect of the Protect America Act of 2007 is that nowhere in the bill is there anything approaching individualized suspicion of who is to be monitored. The Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence can authorize surveillance on anyone "reasonably believed to be outside the United States," provided that a "significant purpose" of the surveillance is the "acquisition of foreign intelligence information." Nowhere do the two officials need to specify, to the FISA Court or the Congress, precisely who is under surveillance. They need only tell the FISA Court that their surveillance methods are geared at communications that probably outside the U.S., primarily. If communications involving people in the U.S. are part of that communication chain, so be it -- as long as the government says it didn't mean to acquire the information as a primary "target." The FISA Court can only object, months after the fact, to the surveillance if those methods are "clearly erroneous. MORE!

I also really respect Glenn Greenwald's opinions and his tenacity in going after the scum that has taken over our country and he chimes in on this bullshit too...From Crooks & Liars:

My personal favorite journalist, Amy Goodman, interviews Glenn Greenwald and Marjorie Cohn about the slippery slope of the FISA bill that the Democrats caved on last week and the ramifications for oversight when the bill “sunsets” in six months.

I love the fact that I keep hearing from the dems about how they are going to change this bill and fix it in 6 months, but we all know how this is going to go...Just like that piece of shit Anti-Patriot Act went...They couldn't wait to make that bullshit permanent...It's like saying the BCS is going to admit to crimes it already got away with...It's not going to happen...They very rarely seldom take power away if at all!

So the question for the day is do you subscribe to the theory that since you are not doing anything wrong (so you think) it is okay for the government to listen in on your calls or follow you around the Internet?

Spy this you bootlicking fascist bitches...

WE THE PEOPLE ARE WAKING YOU BITCHES! 10-acious_D The New Defenders of Personal Privacy!